Are We Living in a Post-Happiness World?

SPOILERS BELOW (Love, Death and Robots)

There's an episode of Love, Death and Robots called Zima Blue, where a robot that scrubs the tiles on the side of a swimming pool is progressively upgraded over many years by engineers until it becomes a fully conscious android. It then obsessively pursues the meaning of life through ever larger art projects, some reaching planetary scale. It eventually concludes it has found the meaning of life and in it's final art project it disables all it's higher cognitive functions and "downgrades" itself back to it's original tile scrubbing form with just enough awareness left to take pleasure in the singular menial task.

EDIT: I just found out it was adapted from a book called Zima Blue and Other Stories by Alastair Reynolds

The author did not do a good job of spelling out the differences in the two types of happiness. In fact, she didn't even address them by their proper names (hedonic and eudaimonic). Identifying the two and really digging in on their differences would probably have made for a more interesting article - and certainly a more enlightening one. Just saying "people are unhappy, don't confuse unhappy with unjoyful" isn't enough. (Spoiler alert: people think they want hedonic when what they're really seeking is eudaimonic.)

We're driven to hedonic happiness to which the article loosely alludes just by having stuff and labels that say to be happy. While short term satisfactory it does nothing for people long term. Eudaimonic happiness is a deeper, almost stoic-like approach to happiness. It involves being a part of something that has potential of outlasting the individual. From my experience it took a while to get to this point and understanding the real differences and putting into practices the ceremonies that go with it.

One little trick that I learned a while back: never say "I have to" when you can say "I get to". For example it's not "I have to help a friend move" it's "I get to help a friend move". It turned from a chore to a treat - and it is a treat because I get to spend time with my friend. Yeah, it's hot, physically exhausting, and all you get at the end of the day is pizza and beer, but at the end of the day _you get pizza and beer_ which is better than 99% of the rest of the world. It may sound kitchy (spelling?) but it works.

NYT used to be a really good paper though.

I thought it was supposed to be this amazing intellectual, philosophical, humanistic thing spreading the courageous word of the truth to unwoked. These people were supposed to be focusing on what we have in common and building common ground.

Fundamentally, the formula of news in 2019 is like this (working on the this):

Create a topic that ignores basic human need that everyone struggles with (housing, school, paying bills, romantic life, family, etc), then imply something less urgent needs priority - oh, and only an arbitrary subset of people have problems. We need to reshape society now, after all, everyone else has an easy life.

Deprive people the validation of even having their needs recognized, even in the title itself. It insults men, women, young, old, of all situations equally :) Except if you use private mode.

Those seem more like tags for happiness. Or buckets into which happiness can be sorted. As an awkward not-so-great fit into two buckets example, think of someone who puts effort into putting together a collection of objects over a long period of time. Maybe it's art, or toys, or whatever. Over time, they show this collection to others. People hear about it and want to see it before they die. Awards may be won. But the person at the center doesn't necessarily need to decide on either type of happiness, and the philosophy barely even needs to exist. It's more of a journey of attention and energy directed both externally and internally.

I think it's worth considering whether this bi-modal distribution of happiness may in fact be just another perspective among many in an N-dimensional space of perspectives. Sure, it has some leverage. But like any model it should probably be held lightly. A multiple model approach to something as important to humans as happiness would be hard to fault.

The pursuit of "happiness" is just about the best way to ensure you remain unhappy. I'm not sure when precisely it happened, but "happiness" got a lot harder to find as soon as humanity hypostatized it and made it into a psuedo-religious concept and the end all-be-all of life--seems like everyone just want's to "be happy". Unfortunately, "happiness" is not concrete--it's a lazy stand-in for the goals you ought to actually be setting for yourself. The point of life is not to "be happy"--happiness is a pleasant side effect of the life well-lived, not its telos.

Pursue something concrete. Set a measurable goal. Aim for small things. Remove the term "happy" from your vocabulary. Just be and do, and focus on things that are small, well defined, modest and not amorphous. Cast aside your distractions. Choose an identity for yourself. Write the obituary you'd want to have. Work toward it. Fulfill your being. All of a sudden, you might feel a certain nonchalance, a certain comfortability, you might find that you can get on just fine without fretting so much. Over time, your worries might even start to dissipate.

Oh, and stop spending so much time consuming and start spending more time producing, crucially, for yourself or for your loved ones, not for an employer. When you interact with other people, use your brain, don't turn it off. Think about them in a serious, focused way. Be present. Contemplate moments. Give good gifts. Break from patterns. Don't be afraid of embarrassment, corniness, or sentiment. Stop following prescribed modes of interaction and existence without even consciously acceding to them.

"Happiness" itself is a big part of the problem, it's just as problematic as every other hypostatized concept that's ever dawned in the course of human history.